Corporations’ economic activities put significant stress on the environment. In order to limit global warming to 1.5°C, companies need to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. However, shifting the responsibility of decarbonisation from being solely on governments to being shared with these companies is only a recent phenomenon. This study therefore explores how more companies can be stimulated to take climate action. To research this, the steel industry is taken as a case study. This particular industry is responsible for a large share of global emissions and includes many non-European firms which have been shown to trail behind their European counterparts considering climate action. The number of companies committing to the SBTi is defined as a quantifiable metric to track the development of climate action in the sector. Initial findings suggest that companies respond vigorously to financial stimulants like carbon pricing. Moreover, it is found that different stakeholder groups can stimulate the decarbonisation of heavy industry in various ways. Firms require certain factors to be at adequate levels before they commit themselves to deep decarbonisation. As such, governmental agencies can play an important role by ensuring that limiting factors like low-carbon electricity are abundant. Financial institutions can furthermore use their position to limit the financial risk for companies willing to decarbonise, while other stakeholder groups can focus on creating awareness and urgency. Altogether, the study results in a novel attempt to develop a useful agent-based model of a business ecosystem in light of the net zero energy transition. Apart from providing insights to stakeholders on how to effectively stimulate climate action, it functions as a foundation for future academic work on this topic.

One of the main strategies for reducing energy demand—and thereby carbon emissions— is increasing energy efficiency. In the Netherlands, energy efficiency policy and energy reduction targets in the residential sector are based on the theoretical energy consumption of buildings, which often over- or underestimates the measured energy consumption. The difference between the actual energy consumption and the calculated energy consumption of a building is referred to as the energy performance gap (EPG). As a consequence of this discrepancy, the estimated energy savings are inaccurate and the energy-saving targets are unattainable. Narrowing the EPG is necessary to develop more accurate estimates of energy savings and realistic targets, and to improve the effectiveness of energy reduction policies and campaigns. Most studies on the EPG have focused predominantly on data from the social rental housing sector, failing to represent the national distribution of home ownership type. At the same time, homeowners and tenants have been shown to behave differently regarding energy consumption.
This thesis investigates the effect of home ownership on the actual natural gas consumption and the EPG by descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and multiple linear regression on a representative sample of the Dutch housing stock. The multiple regression analysis controls for building and occupant characteristics that are expected to influence the actual gas consumption and the EPG, in order to measure the ceteris paribus effect of ownership type on the actual gas consumption and the EPG.
The results show that ownership type does not have a practically significant effect on actual gas consumption or the EPG, while controlling for building and household characteristics. However, without controlling for these factors, there is a moderate positive correlation between home ownership and actual gas consumption, and a weak positive correlation between home ownership and the magnitude of overpredictions. This suggests that observed differences in gas consumption or EPG between ownership groups may be explained by building and household characteristics, rather than by potential behavioral differences. Specifically, the positive correlation between home ownership and actual gas consumption can be explained by the larger floor area, type of buildings, higher income, and larger household size. The positive correlation between home ownership and the size of overpredictions is explained by type of building and larger floor area. Thus, there are no major differences in energy consumption behavior between homeowners and tenants that cause large differences in their actual gas consumption or EPG. Nevertheless, the distinction of ownership type may still be of practical use to policymakers. Targeting homeowners could be an efficient way to promote energy-saving measures in the largest and highest energy-consuming dwellings.

Climate change has increased the interest around energy intensity to many researchers. Understanding the drivers of energy intensity is essential to produce a fitting policy. While structural changes have been acknowledged as drivers of economy-wide energy intensity, it has not been recognised as an influential factor on industry-level energy intensity because there is simply not enough data to do so. To generate a more reliable understanding of the mechanism that drives industries’ energy intensity, I explore the role of international trade on inter-country differences in the energy intensity of industries. The approach in this thesis shows with multiple panel data regressions how changes in trade specialisation in products explain inter-country differences in energy intensity of industries. The results estimate
that an industry’s energy intensity increases when it develops a comparative advantage in products whose production requires lots of energy, ceteris paribus, and decreases when it develops a comparative advantage in products whose production requires little energy. Since the effect of trade specialisation in one product goes on behalf of the effect of trade-specialisation in other products, there is a strong suspicion that there are changing compositions of industries. For policy changes, these results can provide insights into how a centralised approach in trade agreements and a decentralised approach in industry policies can tackle the industry’s energy-intensity problems. In future research, it might
be possible to accurately predict the composition effects by explaining the changes in the energy intensity of products with trade specialisation in products.

In the last couple of years there have been many different Protocols, Accords and Agreements to combat climate change, being the Paris Agreement the last global effort to unite countries for this common cause. However, regardless of these pledges, efforts, and commitments, they are not enough to keep the average rise of global temperature under 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. At the COP21, cities were recognized as key actors in the fight against climate change because of their ability to combine national with local level approaches. In a multi-level system, the increased interconnectedness and competencies among these actors allow the subnational actors to increase their representativeness in central policy processes. The emergence of city climate networks, which are thought to be governing global and local climate action, reflects this multi-level nature and its dynamics. The increased interconnectedness and polycentric governance have allowed local communities to engage in climate mitigation and adaptation policy processes, considered to be a key factor for the success of global, regional and local climate actions.

The energy transition ignites change and fuels modifications in numerous aspects of the society, specifically in the oil and gas industry. Besides, it creates a dynamic environment, an uncertain policy, and an economic environment for international oil companies (IOCs), affecting their business strategies. However, only a few studies focused on the implications of the energy transition on IOCs’ strategies. This paper's main objective was to map the impact of the energy transition on the factors shaping IOCs’ business strategies. By conducting a discourse analysis of annual reports of three IOCs (Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Equinor), in combination with several interviews. The results reveal that the energy transition is a topic of debate for IOCs. Several factors have known fluctuations in importance over the years due to the energy transition. However, not all these fluctuations in factors are explained by the influence of the energy transition. Also, six new energy transition-related factors are proposed and found to impact the IOCs' strategy. Furthermore, although IOCs are an indispensable part of the puzzle to the energy transition's success, collaboration is vital. The IOC’s renewable investments lag, but the newly presented strategies could move the energy transition from being a topic of debate to a shift of substance. This paper concludes with recommendations for further scientific research.

This thesis is an analysis of the implemntation of hydrogen in the Netherlands, in which the partnerships, organization and regulations are analysed from a Socio-technical transition perspective. The aim of this research was to find out how the implementation of hydrogen in the Netherlands has taken place and how this can be facilitated in the future. As an important aspect of hydrogen is cluster formation, this has also been taken into account in the research. Hydrogen cluster delineation is challenging, since they should have a focus not only on incremental innovations but also on radical innovations toward sustainability and often contain a mix of niche players and established regime actors. Additionally hydrogen has a plethora of end-uses, in a multitude of sectors/industries and on different scales. Therefore the clusters were delineated with the use of the proposed merged Technological Innovation Systems (TIS) and Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework from Markard and Truffer (2009). Once all niches that originate from the clusters were identified, these were analysed using the MLP and Strategic Niche Management (SNM), adapted to have more specific criteria. This research utilized a process perspective, which views reality in terms of a stream of events. More specifically the methodology of Event Sequence Analysis (ESA) was used, which provided specific tools for systematically identifying and comparing specific sequences of events. Primary data (from web pages, documents and news messages) was gathered through a specific data gathering process, defined by the ESA methodology, which was visualized as an event map. Secondary data from interviews were used as validation for the regular ESA. From the ESA spanning from the introduction of hydrogen as a sustainable energy carrier around 2001 until 2020, it has become clear that hydrogen implementation in the Netherlands has performed quite well from an internal niche perspective. Despite the high-quality internal niche processes across the board, implementation has been moderate due to the financial barriers that come with hydrogen, which can be attributed to the sheer expense of projects due to the niches’ infancy, the large-scale nature of the transition, with the infrastructural overhaul that needs to take place and some current legislative limitations, such as sub-optimal directives towards hydrogen-grid mixing. Next to this, there are three apparent patterns that can be identified. (1) Firstly, there is a clear succession of niches, meaning that there is a clear link between successive events which influence each other. (2) Secondly, there is a dependence on international collaboration, with most niche implementations being embedded within international (mostly European) initiatives and projects or have been subsidized by them. (3) A final pattern is the regional embedding of the implementation of most of the niches. This can be attributed to the large-scale nature of the transition and the dependence on synergistic implementations with dependence on supply to multiple sectors. To conclude, from the ESA it has become clear that the hydrogen transition is complex and needs active stimulation to become adopted more widely. This thesis suggests that the upscaling should be pursued with three main aspects in mind: (1) Firstly, it should be done within embedded regions, which are mainly formed in (harbor) clusters. (2) Secondly, the ESA proved that international collaboration is of essence in this transition. (3) Lastly, there should initially be a concrete focus on knowledge creation, due to the complexity of the transition, there is still a lack of knowledge with regard to the optimal implementation and a lack of educated personnel, which will all be pivotal for the success of this transition.

This research aims to design and analyse possible system configurations for a system in which wind energy from a Dutch wind farm, supplemented with electricity from the grid, is utilized to produce green hydrogen using an electrolyser, including options for transport of hydrogen to the consumer, and to perform an economic analysis on these system configurations. A design is made using MATLAB and Simulink software, for two system sizes; a 10 MW balance of plant system and a 1.4 MW balance of plant system. The design is made for two types of electrolysers, being an alkaline electrolyser and a PEM electrolyser. System configurations are modelled for operations on a minimum load utilizing all available wind energy, and for operations on nominal load continuously. It was found that the alkaline electrolyser is more energy-efficient and cost-efficient than the PEM electrolyser in this system. Including options for transport, it was found that the 10 MW hydrogen production system has the lowest levelized cost of hydrogen and is the most cost-efficient option. When operating on nominal load, the cost of hydrogen was slightly lower than when operating on minimum load using all available wind energy and restricting the use of grid electricity to a minimum. The cost of hydrogen was found to be sensitive to changes in the electricity price as well as changes in capital cost of the electrolyser. The most cost-effective hydrogen production, producing hydrogen at a cost of 2.95 euro per kg, was found to be the 10 MW alkaline system, operating at nominal load.

The transition towards a sustainable energy system in the built environment is commonly referred to the incremental adoption of a variety of available technologies, practices and policies that may contribute to decrease the environmental impact, at reasonable costs and adequate quality standards. The complexity of the transition requires a sound information provision in order to make decisions which are future proof and optimal in the context of the system dependencies by both public and private parties. This information provision is lacking maturity, and in the era of Big and Open Data, it is believed that data has a significant role to play in the improvement of the information provision towards all stakeholders. This paper presents a study on the information provision in the Dutch energy transition with the focus on the thermal urban transition away from natural-gas. The study adopts the DE approach to answer the following research question: How and under which Data Ecosystem can Open and Big Data be utilized to improve the information provision and support decision-making in the transition towards a sustainable urban thermal energy system, in the Netherlands, given the perceptions and resources of stakeholders?

In the energy transition the expansion of the amount of renewable energy resources requires new methods for the design of energy systems. To deal with intermittent energy production, different energy technologies and solutions are in development. Hydrogen is a main candidate for this goal. Using Fuel Cell or Battery Electric Vehicles as flexible power plants is a second potential solution. This thesis explores how these two concepts can be combined in an office environment. The goal was to design an effective, integrated energy and mobility system making use of renewable energy only. A simulation model was written to carry out techno-economic analyses on a set of concept system designs. These systems were designed in accordance with three scenarios that were analysed for two future years, 2025 and 2050. The scenarios were: hydrogen-based systems, electricity-based systems and combined systems. The model was applied to a case study of the Shell Technology Center Amsterdam, an office building in the Netherlands. In addition, the same analysis was done for a hypothetical case study featuring an average office building in the Netherlands. The results of each simulation are compared mainly by their System Levelized Cost of Energy, for which electricity, gas and thermal demands are taken into account. In the 2050 scenario, the system levelized cost for a hydrogenbased system is 0.056 €/kWh, for an electricity-based system it is 0.077 €/kWh, and for a combined system it is 0.049 €/kWh. The findings of this thesis implicate that hydrogen is a viable alternative to use as an energy carrier in office buildings and for seasonal storage of renewable energy. It can be used in combination with cars as power plants, which are mainly suitable for hourly energy balancing.

The European Union through its Roadmap 2050 has mandated nearly zero energy as the standard for all building stock. While newly built buildings will be of nearly zero energy standard by 31 December 2020 (public-owned buildings after 31 December 2018), new buildings form only 1% of the addition to the existing building stock which implies that to attain nearly zero energy standard for all building stock, large-scale renovations must be performed. However, the renovation to the nearly zero energy standard is not yet cost optimal. To improve the economic feasibility, it is important to find the parameters that have an impact on the cost-optimality of nearly zero energy renovations and the extent of their impact, the results of which can be used to drive the renovation to the nearly zero energy standard in an economically feasible manner. The primary objective of this thesis is the identification of the most important drivers of the economic feasibility of renovating houses in The Netherlands to nearly zero energy standard. The parameters were deduced from a framework available in the literature. The extent of influence was determined by performing partial sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo analysis. Five key parameters had an impact on the NPV- energy price, energy consumption (presented as four separate sub-parameters: electricity and gas consumption both before and after renovation), renovation cost, project life cycle and discount rate. In absolute terms, gas consumption before renovation had the highest impact followed by, renovation cost, electricity consumption after renovation, discount rate, a shift of energy price to the low price scenario, life cycle of the project and electricity consumption before renovation. The gas consumption after renovation and the shift of energy price to the high prices scenario did not have a significant effect on the NPV. The most important drivers of economic feasibility of nearly zero energy renovations are reduction in the renovation cost, discounting the benefits at a lower (social) discount rate until the end of the service life of the house, increasing the retail price of natural gas, decreasing the retail price of electricity and regulation of user behavior in reducing rebound effect (the reduction in the expected energy savings primarily due to occupant’s behavior such as requirement of further comfort). Based on the obtained results, policy recommendations were provided to the Government. Suggestions for further studies include listing all parameters and determining their effect on the NPV, identifying the complete list of indirect benefits that accrue to the citizens of The Netherlands and their valuation using contingent valuation techniques, and performing a cost benefit analysis at the macroeconomic level which will not only consider wider benefits such as infrastructure savings, but also reflect the true value of indirect benefits through reduced externalities and improvement in the productivity of the people on the economy.

Abstract

This thesis describes the energy flows and environmental improvement possibilities of the Amsterdam metropolitan area (AMA), using district heating as thermal energy supply system. Main challenges to over come are finding appropriate thermal supply systems that can serve the required heat wile increasing the overall sustainability. The research presents the environmental improvements and reviews design parameters of different technologies proposed. Results showed that different heat supply configurations can lead to sustainable improvements, mainly reducing the environmental impact concerning abiotic depletion and global warming potential. An analysis to inventory suitable locations that can be attached to the district heat network (DHN) has been carried out. Locations suited to connect to the DHN differ per methodology applied, but are mainly to be found in or near the larger cities of the AMA.